Palazzo Pitti

Palazzo Pitti began as banker Luca Pitti's statement of ambition and ended as the grand-ducal and royal residence of Florence. Inside, the Palatine Gallery's frescoed rooms, the treasury, a costume gallery and royal apartments pile up behind one rusticated facade, with the Boboli Gardens opening out behind.

Why it matters

No other building in Florence concentrates so much of the city's political story under one roof. Work started in the mid-1400s for the banker Luca Pitti, at the foot of the hill that would become Boboli, and the design was later linked to Brunelleschi's circle, though the Uffizi Galleries' own pages treat that attribution as unproven. In 1550 the palace was purchased for Cosimo I de' Medici and Eleanor of Toledo, and from then on it was the residence of whoever ruled Tuscany: the Medici, the Habsburg-Lorraine court from 1737, and the Savoy kings during the years when Florence was capital of Italy.

What to notice

Give the ground floor to the Treasury of the Grand Dukes, displayed around the Palatine Chapel, and to the Museum of Russian Icons, whose holding the official page calls the oldest such collection in Western Europe. The first floor belongs to the Palatine Gallery, where Medici paintings hang inside rooms wrapped in Baroque frescoes, stuccoes and silks — the pictures and the architecture were designed to be seen together, so resist treating the walls as mere background. Continue to the Imperial and Royal Apartments for the Lorraine and Savoy furnishing. Upstairs, the Gallery of Modern Art traces Italian art from Neoclassicism to the 1930s, and the Museum of Costume and Fashion occupies the Palazzina della Meridiana. Between the two courtyards, the Ammannati courtyard is the palace's most theatrical space.

Context and history

The scale was deliberate: Pitti wanted a residence to outshine the Medici palace across the river, and the vast rusticated blocks made the point in stone. Irony followed — his descendants sold out, and the Medici made it their home. Bartolomeo Ammannati later enlarged the palace and staked out the Boboli hillside behind it, and in 1565 Giorgio Vasari strung the elevated Corridoio Vasariano from Palazzo Vecchio across Ponte Vecchio into this building, letting the court cross town without meeting its subjects. The Lorraine grand dukes and the Savoy monarchy each left layers of decoration and furnishing, which is why the rooms read as an anthology of tastes rather than a single stylistic moment. Collections accumulated for four centuries were never dispersed, so the palace functions as the house museum of the Tuscan state itself.